Proof-of-work mining, more commonly referred to as PoW mining, is the activity
of committing your computer’s hardware and resources to process network
transactions and build the blocks that make up the blockchain in the Decred
network. Each time a block is created (by a miner), which is then approved by
ticket holders, the miner receives a block reward (newly created DCR). If the
block is rejected by ticket holders, the miner does not receive a reward.
The block reward adjusts every 6,144 blocks (approximately 21.33 days) by reducing
by a factor of 100/101.

Each new block reward is then split up as follows:

Subsidy

Party

60%

PoW Miners

30%

PoS Voters

10%

Decred Treasury

For more details on the growth of the coin supply, see the
inflation page.

Miners typically receive a reward that is roughly proportional to the
hashrate of your miner and the overall hashrate of the network when you commit
your computer to PoW mining.

PoW mining can be done using GPUs. However, ASICs that mine DCR are now available,
and since their introduction the PoW difficulty has become high enough to make GPU
mining unlikely to be profitable.

Solo mining is not recommended and is not covered by this documentation! The Decred network regularly sees a network hash rate of up to 10,000Gh/s. Solo mining is generally only done by advanced individuals or organized groups with a large cluster of GPUs so it is not addressed here.

Pool Mining

When you mine in a pool, your hashrate is combined with all the other pool miners’ hashrates to look for the correct solution for a block. You will receive a reward based on the amount of work your miner performs in the pool.
Pool mining distributes shares based on blocks found so you can earn a steady amount of Decred rather than the “all or none” of solo mining.

GPU drivers usually contain the libraries needed for mining. If you have difficulties running the software you may wish to re-install and specifically check that the OpenCL (AMD) or CUDA (NVIDIA) libraries are selected.

Please be certain to select the correct operating system (Windows/Linux) and the correct version for your GPU type (CUDA for NVIDIA cards, OpenCL/OpenCLADL for AMD cards). gominer is only available to 64-bit operating systems. User guides to start mining with gominer can be found here: